🚀 go-pugleaf

> ...Utah teaches functional programming
> with Lisp, Scheme, and Miranda in several undergrad courses, but nevertheless
> all we seem to produce are C hackers.

Is this so bad?  I would hope the exposure to the declarative languages 
would at least improve the C hackers' style.  I first learned FORTRAN 
in high school and wrote spaghetti-code.  After learning ALGOL, I had 
to go back to FORTRAN, but at least I could write structured control-flow 
with gotos.  Likewise, learning Pascal helped me think in terms of data 
structures, even if they had to be implemented as FORTRAN arrays.

Learning declarative languages should help C hackers:

	1) Distinguish definition from implementation.  
	2) Keep variables as local as possible.  
	3) Use parameters instead of global side-effects to pass information.

I believe a dose of object-oriented programming (e.g. Smalltalk) also 
improves the C hacker's style.  (Note that this is the hacker's version of
the old "learn Latin to improve your English" argument.)

Arch D. Robison
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
	
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